Smokers

Despite all this activity Churchill’s daily routine changed little during these years. He awoke about 7:30 a.m. and remained in bed for a substantial breakfast and reading of mail and all the national newspapers. For the next couple of hours, still in bed, he worked, dictating to his secretaries.

At 11:00 a.m., he arose, bathed, and perhaps took a walk around the garden, and took a weak whisky and soda to his study.

At 1:00 p.m. he joined guests and family for a three-course lunch. Clementine drank claret, Winston champagne, preferable Pol Roger served at a specific temperature, port brandy and cigars. When lunch ended, about 3:30 p.m. he returned to his study to work, or supervised work on his estate, or played cards or backgammon with Clementine.

At 5:00 p.m., after another weak whisky and soda, he went to be for an hour and a half. He said this siesta, a habit gained in Cuba, allowed him to work 1 1/2 days in every 24 hours. At 6:30 p.m. he awoke, bathed again, and dressed for dinner at 8:00 p.m.

Dinner was the focal-point and highlight of Churchill’s day. Table talk, dominated by Churchill, was as important as the meal. Sometimes, depending on the company, drinks and cigars extended the event well past midnight. The guests retired, Churchill returned to his study for another hour or so of work.

First drafts as early in the morning as possible, then second, then third (retyping, I work on a manual). Once the first draft is 80% completed I start on the second, so that there's a conveyor belt of drafts in progress: this helps me to grasp the totality of the book. I accelerate towards the end, usually because I'm on or past my deadline.

In your line of work, you spend much of your time alone. How do you survive?

Rituals. Smoking--pipes, cigars, special brands, accessories, the whole bollocks. Coffee, tea, strange infusions--I have a stove on my desk. Fetishising typewriters, pens, etc. Overall, though, I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer.

We now settled into a routine which has ever since served in my mind as an archetype, so that what I still mean when I speak of a "normal" day (and lament that normal days are so rare) is a day of the Bookham pattern. For if I could please myself I would always live as I lived there. I would choose always to breakfast at exactly eight and to be at my desk by nine, there to read or write till one. If a cup of good tea or coffee could be brought me about eleven, so much the better. A step or so out of doors for a pint of beer would not do quite so well; for a man does not want to drink alone and if you meet a friend in the taproom the break is likely to be extended beyond its ten minutes. At one precisely lunch should be on the table; and by two at the latest I would be on the road. Not, except at rare intervals, with a friend. Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outdoor world; and talking leads almost inevitably to smoking, and then farewell to nature as far as one of our senses is concerned. The only friend to walk with is one (such as I found, during the holidays, in Arthur) who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared. The return from the walk, and the arrival of tea, should be exactly coincident, and not later than a quarter past four. Tea should be taken in solitude, as I took it as Bookham on those (happily numerous) occasions when Mrs. Kirkpatrick was out; the Knock himself disdained this meal. For eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably. Of course not all books are suitable for mealtime reading. It would be a kind of blasphemy to read poetry at table. What one wants is a gossipy, formless book which can be opened anywhere. The ones I learned so to use at Bookham were Boswell, and a translation of Herodotus, and Lang's History of English Literature. Tristram Shandy, Elia and the Anatomy of Melancholy are all good for the same purpose. At five a man should be at work again, and at it till seven. Then, at the evening meal and after, comes the time for talk, or, failing that, for lighter reading; and unless you are making a night of it with your cronies (and at Bookham I had none) there is no reason why you should ever be in bed later than eleven. But when is a man to write his letters? You forget that I am describing the happy life I led with Kirk or the ideal life I would live now if I could. And it is essential of the happy life that a man would have almost no mail and never dread the postman's knock.

[This interview was conducted during the graphic designer's one-year sabbatical in Bali, Indonesia.]

So, are you happy?

As I am very aware how boring it is to hear about other people being happy, I say only this: I get up every morning at 5 a.m. simply because it's more exciting to start working than to turn around and sleep some more. I do seem to have a lot of energy. After enjoying a giant pot of coffee and a medium-sized cigar for breakfast, I start my daily schedule of little experiments. This is coming along very well.

Days were as unvaried as the notes of the cuckoo. Flaubert, a man of nocturnal habits, usually awoke at 10 a.m. and announced the event with his bell cord. Only then did people dare speak above a whisper. His valet, Narcisse, straightaway brought him water, filled his pipe, drew the curtains, and delivered the morning mail. Conversation with Mother, which took place in clouds of tobacco smoke particularly noxious to the migraine sufferer, preceded a very hot bath and a long, careful toilette involving the regular application of a tonic reputed to arrest hair loss. At 11 a.m. he entered the dining room, where Mme Flaubert; Liline; her English governess, Isabel Hutton; and very often Uncle Parain would have gathered. Unable to work well on a full stomach, he ate lightly, or what passed for such in the Flaubert household, meaning that his first meal consisted of eggs, vegetables, cheese or fruit, and a cup of cold chocolate. The family then lounged on the terrace, unless foul weather kept them indoors, or climbed a steep path through woods behind their espaliered kitchen garden to a glade dubbed La Mercure after the statue of Mercury that once stood there. Shaded by chestnut trees, near their hillside orchard, they would argue, joke, gossip, and watch vessels sail up and down the river. Another site of open-air refreshment was the eighteenth-century pavilion. After dinner, which generally lasted from seven to nine, dusk often found them there, looking out at moonlight flecking the water and fisherman casting their hoop nets for eel.

In June 1852, Flaubert told Louise Colet that he worked from 1 p.m. to 1 a.m.. A year later, when he assumed partial responsibility for Liline's education and gave her an hour or more of his time each day, he may not have put pen to paper at his large round writing table until two o'clock or later.

[The following is from Francis Darwin's reminiscences of his father. It summarizes a typical day in Darwin's middle and later years, when he had developed a rigid routine that seldom changed, even when there were visitors in the house.]

7 a.m.

Rose and took a short walk.

7:45 a.m.

Breakfast alone

8–9:30 a.m.

Worked in his study; he considered this his best working time.

9:30–10:30 a.m.

Went to drawing-room and read his letters, followed by reading aloud of family letters.

10:30 a.m.–12 or 12:15 p.m.

Returned to study, which period he considered the end of his working day.

12 noon

Walk, starting with visit to greenhouse, then round the sandwalk, the number of times depending on his health, usually alone or with a dog.

12:45 p.m.

Lunch with whole family, which was his main meal of the day. After lunch read The Times and answered his letters.

3 p.m.

Rested in his bedroom on the sofa and smoked a cigarette, listened to a novel or other light literature read by ED [Emma Darwin, his wife].

Light high tea while the family dined. In late years never stayed in the dining room with the men, but retired to the drawing-room with the ladies. If no guests were present, he played two games of backgammon with ED, usually followed by reading to himself, then ED played the piano, followed by reading aloud.

10 p.m.

Left the drawing-room and usually in bed by 10:30, but slept badly.

Even when guests were present, half an hour of conversation at a time was all that he could stand, because it exhausted him.

INTERVIEWERWhat are some of your writing habits? Do you use a desk? Do you write on a machine?

CAPOTEI am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I've got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don't use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand. Essentially I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon. Obsessions of this sort, and the time I take over them, irritate me beyond endurance.

If Elaine [Fried, whom de Kooning married in 1943] found it strange to return directly to work on her wedding day, she never said so. That was the way of life on Twenty-second Street: every woman in de Kooning's life from Nini onward could attest that he was already married to his work. During the time when Elaine was commuting back and forth to Brooklyn, de Kooning's days were devoted to art, and they continued to be so after she moved in permanently. Typically, the couple rose late in the morning. Breakfast consisted mostly of very strong coffee, cut with the milk they kept in winter on a window ledge; they did not have a refrigerator, an appliance that in the early forties was still a luxury. (So was a private phone, which de Kooning would not have until the early sixties.) Then the day's routine began with de Kooning moving to his end of the studio and Elaine to hers. Work was punctuated by more cups of strong coffee, which de Kooning made by boiling the coffee as he had learned to do in Holland, and by many cigarettes. The two stayed at their easels until fairly late, taking a break only to go out for something to eat or to walk up to Times Square to see a movie. Often, however, de Kooning, who hated to stop working, began again after supper and pushed far into the night, leaving Elaine to go to a party or concert. "I remember very often walking by and seeing the lights on and going up," said Marjorie Luyckx. "In those studios, the heat used to go off after five o'clock because they were commercial buildings. Bill would be painting with his hat and coat on. Painting away, and whistling."

On most days, he would get up at half past seven, go out onto the porch at the back door, and do the "daily dozen" sequence of calisthenic exercises he had performed every day since 1920. While Ethel, always a late riser, was still upstairs in bed, Wodehouse would prepare his regular breakfast -- toast and honey or marmalade, a slice of coffee cake and a mug of tea -- and, as part of the early morning routine, he would read a "breakfast book," for example a Rex Stout or Ngaio Marsh mystery. Then he would light the first pipe of the day, crumbling the cigars Peter Schwed sent him into the bowl in preference to pipe tobacco. At nine o'clock, after a short walk with some of the dogs, he would retire to his study, a spacious, pine-clad room overlooking the garden, for the morning's work. His writing methods had not changed in years. He would sit and brood in a favourite armchair, draft a paragraph or two in pencil, then move to the typewriter, sitting under a Victorian oil painting of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank's Lombard Street offices. Even in old age, he was still translating the chaos of reality into the farcical stability of Blandings Castle. There is something both heroic and poignant about the octogenarian Wodehouse, in exile, pecking away at his typewriter.

In his last decade, Wodehouse could still average 1,000 words a day where, as a younger man, he had often written 2,500 words and more. The morning's work would be followed by lunch -- usually meat and two veg, followed by an English pudding like apple crumble -- at about one o'clock. If he was visiting Remsenburg, Bolton, now also in his eighties, would arrive at two for their daily walk, an hour-long circuit, a regular outing which would unfailingly bring Wodehouse back home in time for the all-important rendezvous with his favourite soap opera, The Edge of the Night. At about four, he and Ethel would have tea, which was served, English style, on good china with cucumber sandwiches. After this, he might snooze a bit in his armchair, have a bath, and do some more work, before the evening cocktail (sherry for her, a lethal martini for him) at six, which they took in the sun parlour, overlooking the garden. This was followed by dinner, alone with Ethel, and eaten early to allow the cook to get home to her family. After dinner, Wodehouse would usually read, but occasionally he would play two-handed bridge with Ethel, a habit, he joked, that doubtless suggested he was senile.

His daily schedule then looked something like this. He got up at 5:00 A.M. His servant Martin Lampe, who worked for him from at least 1762 until 1802, would wake him. The old soldier was under orders to be persistent, so that Kant would not sleep longer. Kant was proud that he never got up even half an hour late, even though he found it hard to get up early. It appears that during his early years, he did sleep in at times. After getting up, Kant would drink one or two cups of tea -- weak tea. With that, he smoked a pipe of tobacco. The time he needed for smoking it "was devoted to meditation." Apparently, Kant had formulated the maxim for himself that he would smoke only one pipe, but it is reported that the bowls of his pipes increased considerably in size as the years went on. He then prepared his lectures and worked on his books until 7:00. His lectures began at 7:00, and they would last until 11:00. With the lectures finished, he worked again on his writings until lunch. Go out to lunch, take a walk, and spend the rest of the afternoon with his friend Green. After going home, he would do some more light work and read.

His mode of living consisted of daily visits to the British Museum reading-room, where he normally remained from nine in the morning until it closed at seven; this was followed by long hours of work at night, accompanied by ceaseless smoking, which from a luxury had become an indispensable anodyne; this affected his health permanently and he became liable to frequent attacks of a disease of the liver sometimes accompanied by boils and an inflammation of the eyes, which interfered with his work, exhausted and irritated him, and interrupted his never certain means of livelihood. "I am plagued like Job, though not so God-fearing," he wrote in 1858.

When the Styrons settled in their Connecticut farmhouse and began a
family, his life became the ideal of any aspiring writer: productive
yet relaxed, sociable yet protected. On the door frame outside his
workroom, he tacked a piece of cardboard with a quotation from Flaubert
written on it: ''Be regular and orderly in your life, like a good
bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.''

The
precept seemed to work for him, but it was an unconventional routine he
stuck to: sleep until noon; read and think in bed for another hour or
so; lunch with Rose around 1:30; run errands, deal with the mail,
listen to music, daydream and generally ease into work until 4. Then up
to the workroom to write for four hours, perfecting each paragraph
until 200 or 300 words are completed; have cocktails and dinner with
the family and friends at 8 or 9; and stay up until 2 or 3 in the
morning, drinking and reading and smoking and listening to music.

With
Rose to guard the door, run the household, organize their busy social
life and look after the children, Mr. Styron followed this routine over
the next 30 years.

AMISYes. I don’t get up very early. I linger over breakfast reading
the papers, telling myself hypocritically that I’ve got to keep with what’s
going on, but really staving off the dreadful time when I have to go to the
typewriter. That’s probably about ten-thirty, still in pajamas and dressing
gown. And the agreement I have with myself is that I can stop whenever I like
and go and shave and so on. In practice, it’s not till about one or one-fifteen
that I do that—I usually try and time it with some music on the radio. Then I
emerge, and nicotine and alcohol are produced. I work on until about two or
two-fifteen, have lunch, then if there’s urgency about, I have to write in the
afternoon, which I really hate doing—I really dislike afternoons, whatever’s
happening. But then the agreement is that it doesn’t matter how little gets
done in the afternoon. And later on, with luck, a cup of tea turns up, and then
it’s only a question of drinking more cups of tea until the bar opens at six o’clock
and one can get into second gear. I go on until about eight-thirty and I always
hate stopping. It’s not a question of being carried away by one’s creative
afflatus, but saying, “Oh dear, next time I do this I shall be feeling tense
again.”